Multicompartment Depletion Factors for Water Consumption on a Global Scale

Abstract

Balancing human communities’ and ecosystems’ need for freshwater is one of the major challenges of the 21st century as population growth and improved living conditions put increasing pressure on freshwater resources. While frameworks to assess the environmental impacts of freshwater consumption have been proposed at the regional scale, an operational method to evaluate the consequences of consumption on different compartments of the water system and account for their interdependence is missing at the global scale. Here, we develop depletion factors that simultaneously quantify the effects of water consumption on streamflow, groundwater storage, soil moisture, and evapotranspiration globally. We estimate freshwater availability and water consumption using the output of a global-scale surface water–groundwater model for the period 1960–2000. The resulting depletion factors are provided for 8,664 river basins, representing 93% of the landmass with significant water consumption, i.e., excluding Greenland, Antarctica, deserts, and permanently frozen areas. Our findings show that water consumption leads to the largest water loss in rivers, followed by aquifers and soil, while simultaneously increasing evapotranspiration. Depletion factors vary regionally with ranges of up to four orders of magnitude depending on the annual consumption level, the type of water used, aridity, and water transfers between compartments. Our depletion factors provide valuable insights into the intertwined effects of surface and groundwater consumption on several hydrological variables over a specified period. The developed depletion factors can be integrated into sustainability assessment tools to quantify the ecological impacts of water consumption and help guide sustainable water management strategies, while accounting for the performance limitations of the underlying model.

Improved Water Collection from Short-Term Fog on a Patterned Surface with Interconnected Microchannels

“…The exacerbating global water scarcity and climatic changes require a refocus on reliable and sustainable water supply. − Among the nonconventional water sources, atmospheric water, which usually survives in some semiarid or economically less-developed regions, is an essential portion of the global freshwater resources. , The emerging technology of atmospheric water harvesting, which can extract water from moisture, is rapidly developing. Researchers are developing autonomous materials that can directly collect water from ambient , or designing patterned surfaces with wetting gradients to harvest water from the atmosphere.…”

Desalination, Water Re-use, and Halophyte Cultivation in Salinized Regions: A Highly Productive Groundwater Treatment System

“…About half of the world’s population relies on groundwater that, in many locations, is becoming depleted and salinized through over-extraction and seawater intrusion. − This trend is expected to accelerate over coming decades, as rising seas invade coastal aquifers in diverse locations such as Florida, Spain, Italy, the Gaza strip, India, Bangladesh, and Vietnam. − Desalination is widely used to improve the quality of deteriorated groundwater for domestic or irrigation purposes. − The demand for groundwater desalination is growing quickly with about 1 million m 3 /day of global capacity being added each year . Most of this capacity uses brackish water reverse osmosis (RO) technology, which is the most efficient and mature groundwater desalination technology available today.…”

Inseguridad alimentaria en el Perú:la multidisciplinaria de un problema enraizado en la sociedad

“…Los niveles de perturbación antropogénica de cuatro de los procesos/característicos del sistema terrestre (cambio climático, integridad de la biosfera, flujos biogeoquímicos y cambios en el sistema terrestre) superan el límite plantario propuesto. Y en Pierrat et al (2023) que indican, que el consumo de agua dulce de las comunidades humanas conduce a la mayor pérdida de agua en los ríos, seguido de los acuíferos y el suelo, al mismo tiempo que aumenta la evapotranspiración poniendo en riesgo dicho recurso.…”